About

Law for Kids parodies (a.k.a. “Lawl for Kids”) are a series of exploitable comics based off of an educational website for kids. The original site, Law For Kids, was a web site dedicated to teaching children about the laws in Arizona. Due to its campy “youth-in-trouble” scenarios, highly predictable moral lessons and simple art, Law for Kids comics have become a popular subject of parodies and satires on the web.

Origin

The website Lawsforkids.org[1] was created in September 1997 by the Arizona Foundation for Legal Services and Education with the specific goal of “educating Arizona’s youth, their parents, communities and schools to increase their knowledge about youth laws and to encourage law-abiding behavior.” The site hosts a wide range of activities for the youths and children, such as video games[2], stories[3] and cartoons[4]. This one, shown below, is a cartoon strip titled “Driving Drunk”[5]:

Spread

The earliest known parodies of Law for Kids comics were posted on internet humor website i-Mockery[7] in 2003, when a site-wide contest[8] was held to see who could come up with the funniest remix of the strip. The site also appeared on Metafilter on December 14th, 2003. Law for Kids parodies have been also seen elsewhere like Ultimate Guitar forums[9] and FacePunch forums[10] as well as on 4chan[11] and YTMND[12]. Law for Kids parodies eventually found its way to Digg[13] in 2006 and Reddit[14] in 2008.

In 2006, a blog styled website named “Lawl for Kids” was launched to collect and curate parodies of Law for Kids comic strips. Eventually, this website stopped updating and went down. However, some participants in the parodies archived what was there[15]. Some small communities still create new parodies passively.